Cooking dailies and you

The new cooking dailies (Orgrimmar / Stormwind) reward you with 1-2 cooking skill and 1-2 cooking tokens, depending on the quest.

The cooking skill is most probably going to be wasted, since anybody who cares about this will be capped on cooking on their main character (I am, for instance).

The cooking tokens can be used to buy the new Cataclysm cooking recipes and Crate of Tasty Meat. The latter costs two tokens and can contain some random gray items and some random Cataclysm meat.

On your main character, you want to start doing the dailies now and spend the tokens on recipes to get an edge. The cooking skillups from the quests, like I said, will be wasted – but you’ll have recipes ahead of time. (Kaliope’s Cataclysm Cooking Leveling Guide suggests fish recipes to level up on, as those are more reliable than farmed-meat recipes.)

On any of your alts above level 10, including bank alts, unused characters and the like, you also want to start doing the dailies now (all you need is Cooking 1, so just pick up the profession if you don’t have it – no need to skill it up) – and buy the Crate of Tasty Meat every time you have two tokens.

You can then either sell the meat, or keep it to level cooking on your main. Assuming you have the recipe – which you should be able to get if you do the quests on your main before Cataclysm hits – every bit of meat you get is a fish you don’t have to fish up.